Horizon Point Consulting

Category: Talent Management

Read our blogs in this category for stories and best practices from real clients and real research on Talent Management.

  • Trick, Treat, or Train: 6 Resources for Scary Good Employee Engagement

    Trick, Treat, or Train: 6 Resources for Scary Good Employee Engagement

    Ding, dong, the witch is…hovering over your shoulder micromanaging your work!? This Halloween, instead of Trick or Treat, let’s Train. We’re highlighting two applications of training as an employee engagement solution, plus 6 links to related resources on The Point Blog. 

    Last week, Lorrie and I spoke about our Illuminate program at the University of Alabama’s HR Management Conference. Before the session, an attendee came up to chat with us about the HR horrors she’d been dealing with at her new company. Her scariest issue: employees’ fear of big, bad HR. She said she felt like the HR monster, scaring everybody on the manufacturing floor with her big, bad, scary HR presence…until she just started talking to people. Every day, she walks the floor and speaks to each individual person with a smile and a “good morning”. She talks to people without needing anything from them. Now, the employees respect her and see her as a valued resource, not a spooky monster. This is “relationshipping”, and it’s critical for workplace wellness and employee engagement. Just like Ivey trained herself to be a relationshipper (and indirectly trained others), you can train yourself by practicing these strategies:  

    Today, I talked with 50 program managers about “Creating a Culture of Radical Candor”, i.e. Kim Scott’s framework of caring personally about people and being willing to challenge them directly. The spooky version: instead of tricking people into believing you care about them (manipulative insincerity) or treating people like besties (ruinous empathy), let’s train ourselves and those around us to practice radical candor, or graceful accountability as we call it at HPC. 

    Have stories about effective employee engagement? We’d love to hear them! Send us a note at info@horizonpointconsulting.com.

  • The Crossover of Adaptive Leadership and Storytelling

    The Crossover of Adaptive Leadership and Storytelling

    I recently read an article by the Huntsville Business Journal about adaptive leadership, and I immediately sent it to everyone on the HPC team. I thought, “This is what we’re always talking about!! The HBJ gets it!!” We truly believe that leadership behaviors rooted in CODE have significantly higher impact, and we’re seeing this play out in a big way with one of our clients. 

    Four years ago, a client asked us to explore gender equality in their organization. This included analysis of leadership demographics, a comprehensive survey to all employees, and focus group discussions. During the study, some challenges beyond the scope of gender equality emerged. As a result, we implemented a pilot Encounter Group program. Encounter groups are defined as “a group of people who meet with a trained leader to increase self-awareness and social sensitivity, and to change behavior through interpersonal confrontation, self-disclosure, and strong emotional expression.” In other words, we gather in small groups and share perspectives, life-changing events, backgrounds, and factors that affect decisions across the workforce. The end goal is to bring about mutual understanding and respect in order to address issues of polarization and awareness.   

    Our Encounter Group curriculum addresses the CODE model of adaptive leadership through storytelling and conversation. 

    Our very first exercise with Encounter Groups is Share Story, where the facilitator creates a safe environment for participants to share real stories about their lives and listen respectfully to others, aligning with the EQ element of the CODE model. 

    Through a series of implicit bias exercises, including examining bias in workplace practices, we discuss organizational integrity in the context of DWYSYWD: do what you say you will do. If you’re going to have policies and procedures that are meant to establish fairness, it’s just as important that everyone is equally held accountable to them. In other words, if you’re going to preach fairness, you have to practice it, too. 

    We also read stories of others. Business leaders, athletes, veterans, immigrants; we read stories of people that are different from our stories. This exercise stretches and develops our understanding of a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace culture. 

    The capstone session of our Encounter Groups includes a critique of stories we consume day-to-day, whether from news outlets, social media, or managers in our own organization. We talk about getting out of your filter bubble – intentionally seeking stories and information that represent people who are different from you and your “feed”. We talk about silos in workplaces, in-groups and out-groups, and how important it is to examine who or what is shaping your perspective. Is your opinion of your workplace shaped by a person or group of people you work with? You might think your workplace is fair and inclusive, but are you missing a key perspective that’s different? 

    Now, four years later, the Encounter Groups are ongoing, and the organization has strengthened its support for an employee-led DEI Council. Through storytelling and adaptive leadership principles, people are becoming the focus once again.  

     

  • Bring Me a Rock

    Bring Me a Rock

    My husband has a great analogy for ineffective communication that goes like this: 

    It’s like when they say, “Bring me a rock”. You go outside, grab the first rock you see, and take it to them. They say “No, we need a different rock.” You go back outside, grab a different rock, take it back, and they say “No, not that rock. It needs to be gray.” And so on and so forth until you eventually figure out that they wanted a big, round, gray rock from the bottom of the Mississippi River. How were you supposed to know that? If they knew what they wanted, why didn’t they just say it? 

    When people experience this type of interaction over and over again, they become less trusting and less engaged with the work. They start to feel like nothing they ever do will be the right thing, because it’s never clear what the right thing actually is. It’s a very demotivating work environment where accountability is high and psychological safety is not: the anxiety zone.

    We should all be working to find the right balance between accountability and psychological safety. In other words, we can absolutely have high standards of performance and a people-first, inclusive culture. I call this Graceful Accountability. 

    If you’ve heard me talk about Graceful Accountability, you know I’m serious about it. I’ve seen countless healthy and unhealthy teams over the years, and the difference is almost always the result of either too much “speak up” or too much “do what we tell you to do”. It’s either so relaxed and accepting that results suffer, or it’s so structured and rigid that people suffer. When we practice Graceful Accountability, we reset the balance. 

    Next time you need someone to bring you a rock, meet them in the middle – figure out what it is you really need and communicate those expectations clearly (accountability), then allow space for questions, discussion, and gratitude (psychological safety). 

    What are you doing now to find the right balance of accountability and psychological safety? 

    —

    Attending the UA HR Conference? Catch Jillian’s session October 27th at 11am. Learn more about #UAHR22 at horizonpointconsulting.com/whatsup. 

  • How to Develop Inclusive Training

    How to Develop Inclusive Training

    When was the last time someone asked you how you prefer to learn? Has someone ever asked if you need assistive technology? 

    As a trainer and facilitator, I definitely miss the mark sometimes on inclusive training. It’s hard. There’s no way around it; it’s not easy to design or deliver training in a language, structure, platform, etc. that works well for every learner. It’s hard, but it’s so important to try. 

    There is robust research out there about learning styles, learner variability, and inclusive curriculum design. Let’s look at this excerpt from research about Universal Design for Learning (UDL), a “framework to improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights into how humans learn”. 

    UDL is based on the premise that learner variability is the norm. UDL researchers emphasize that there is no “average” or “typical” learner and that all learners have varied abilities, strengths, experiences, and preferences… aspects that can be dynamic and changing depending on one’s context and development… 

    As an instructional design framework, UDL provides a structure to proactively build in supports that address the learner variability that exists within any group. Taking learner variability into account, the process of planning instruction in alignment with UDL guidelines allows educators to consider and integrate flexible and supportive options that are helpful for all learners from the outset. 

    UDL-based instruction can make existing educational practices more inclusive, by providing support to a wider range of learners.  

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    Here is a graphic from CAST, the creators of UDL, that outlines the three major components of UDL and questions to ask yourself as a trainer or educator:

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    What is your team doing to acknowledge and understand different learning styles? How are you accommodating differences? 

    One great, free resource for understanding learning styles is The VARK Questionnaire. This is a free, simple quiz that anyone can take on a smart device. VARK stands for Visual, Aural, Read/Write, and Kinesthetic – the four primary learning styles. The quiz measures a person’s preferences for each style and includes a Multimodal Style for those of us who prefer to learn through more than one method. 

    VARK also provides free insights, such as “How can VARK help my Business?” and “Using VARK in Online Learning”.  

    Once we understand the instructional design piece, we need to think about inclusive training from a participant perspective. Who’s in the room? Is it only top leadership? Only junior managers? A combination? 

    Here’s research to consider from the NeuroLeadership Institute about “everyone-to-everyone” learning, a practice that shifts the paradigm of traditional training to a model that allows all team members to engage with learning at the same time.  

    Because social norms are based on the assumption that everyone else is doing something, if people aren’t engaging in the new behavior — which is likely in a company of 10,000 people if only 100 of them learned new habits — they’ll continue to engage in old, undesired behaviors since that’s what they see.

    A better approach is what we call ‘everyone-to-everyone learning’.

    In this model, the entire organization goes through the same learning experience at the same time. Instead of day-long or multi-day, in-person workshops — which can’t be administered to all employees at once without bringing the organization to a standstill — learning consists of memorable, bite-sized sessions delivered virtually.

    Simply put, you’re able to shift from a model of teaching a few people a lot slower to teaching a lot of people a little bit very quickly. And at an organizational level, this ends up being far more effective.

    Is everyone-to-everyone learning something you can implement? Could this model be adapted for your organization’s structure and needs? 

    Ultimately, it’s not easy to design learning for everyone, but it’s important to do the work and make our best effort at inclusive training. Talk to your team about their preferences and needs, and do some research and experiment. Be the first domino!  

     

  • Crafting a Thoughtful Performance Management System

    Crafting a Thoughtful Performance Management System

    I recently asked a room full of managers representing dozens of organizations if they actually liked their own company’s performance management system. What do you think they said? 

    Some of us may think of Performance Management as a rubber stamp on an annual review. We often don’t think of it as a living, breathing, system. Others of us may think of Performance Management as monitoring what we’re doing wrong. We may not think of it as monitoring and developing what we’re doing right. 

    When an organization thoughtfully designs, implements, and continuously improves a performance management system, it should look like the graphic below, representing a continuous, living cycle. 

     

    OBJECTIVE

    Company objectives should be driven by the organization’s vision, mission, and values, and these objectives should cascade and influence manager and individual contributor objectives. Read more from Mary Ila on 6 Ways to Design Your Performance Management System Around Company Values. 

    How are you writing company, department, and individual objectives? 

    MONITOR

    Progress towards objectives should be monitored regularly, and “regularly” should be a customized cadence that works for your organization. 

    For the context of this post, let’s assume that formal performance reviews are held annually. We recommend formal and informal monitoring in addition to the annual review. This may look like an informal monthly one-on-one and a formal mid-year review with your direct supervisor. 

    How are you effectively and regularly monitoring progress towards objectives? 

    COACH

    If there’s anything you take away from this light reading, I hope it’s that everyone needs coaching. High performers, low performers, and everyone in between. 

    Coaching is critical to successful performance management systems. This is where we catch potential issues and allow time for correction before a formal review period ends. This is also where we acknowledge and reinforce positive behaviors and results in real-time instead of waiting for the formal review. 

    How often are you coaching your direct reports? How often are you receiving coaching from a supervisor? Is the coaching meaningful? 

    EVALUATE

    The formal evaluation is an important element of any performance management system. It often drives rewards (stay tuned), succession planning, and development opportunities. All organizations should have a structured performance evaluation process that gauges the successful completion of objectives (or lack thereof) and sets the foundation for future objectives.

    One of the most critical components of evaluation is that team members be made aware of the evaluation methods and criteria at the start of the evaluation period. In other words, if my performance is evaluated from January to December and my annual review is in December, I need to know by January at the latest what my objectives and expectations are for the upcoming year. I need to know what I’m going to be evaluated on. What chance do I have of performing well if I don’t know what I’m expected to do? 

    When and how are you letting people know what methods and criteria will be used in their formal evaluations? 

    REWARD

    This is where we put our money where our mouths are. In order for a performance review to be effective, the rewards or incentives need to be clear, relevant, and meaningful. Employees want to know: “Why should I work hard to achieve goals? Why does it matter whether I score low or high on a review?” 

    Do your policies clearly outline the rewards structure, including how rewards are determined? Are rewards actually relevant and meaningful to your employees? 

     

    When I asked a room of nearly 50 managers if they truly liked their own organization’s performance management system, only 3 people said yes. What are you doing to help your own managers answer “Yes!” to that question?